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 wrote the later books, we didn't have that straight from the gut brevity. In fact, when we wrote "Rework," the initial manuscript that we submitted was, I think, 50,000 words. That was what the publisher got to see, right? And they were very excited. "Great, this fits. This is just the size of the book."

David Heinemeier Hansson: And then Jason and I went through it and cut it in half, and it was down to 25,000 words, and the publisher freaked out. They're like, "We can't publish a business book that looks like this. That looks like a pamphlet." So, we had to pad it with spacing and margins and illustrations to get to it. But it was really that process, cutting it from 50,000 words to 25,000 words and taking some essays from two pages down to four paragraphs, that really made it all happen.

David Heinemeier Hansson: So, I want to retain that ability to distill, and sometimes just being able mechanically to talk for 20 minutes about a topic is not always the best thing about...

David Senra: Obviously, we talked about this at dinner last night. I woke up, my abs were sore because I was laughing so much, right? But I told you this yesterday. It's like, I've been reading your writing for 15 years. So yeah, your writing... I think brevity is the right thing to optimize for there, getting across your point in as few succinct ways as possible.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: That's true.

David Senra: The art of conversation.

David Heinemeier Hansson: It is a different medium.

David Senra: The best conversations that you've ever had in your life are not like, "Oh, yeah, I talked to this guy for five minutes. It's great."

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: It's like, "I talked to this guy for five hours."

David Heinemeier Hansson: That's fun, yes.

David Senra: And so, this is why it's so important, why I wanted you on the show immediately, and we've been working, trying to figure this out for a few months together. It's like, dude, I remember watching "Startup School" in Y Combinator. You probably did it in 2008. And there are lines from that because you were unfiltered, and I think that's like an hour long of just, like, this is what's in my mind right now, and here's how I think about things, that I still think of 15 years later.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: Let me ask you a question. The brevity. You've built so many different products. I lost count of how many of them have made millions, multi-millions in profits, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions in profits. Do you apply this ruthless edit, like Rick Rubin's idea of this ruthless edit? I started out with 10.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: I'm going to cut down. I think I need five. No, I'm going to cut all the way down to three.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: And then be so judicious about what I add back. Like, how do you think about that when you're building products?

David Heinemeier Hansson: It's even more on our minds now than it used to be, and it was always on our mind. Our initial spiel, our tagline, was "Less Software." When we launched Basecamp back in 2004, it was often contrasted with Microsoft Project, and other kind of enterprise-y heavy tools. And our pitch was always, "It's really good, but one of the reasons why it's really good is it's just less. There are fewer features, there's less to learn, there's less to teach, there's just less, and we focus on making the few things it does do, do very well."

David Heinemeier Hansson: Now, in this new age where using agents and AI has made it so much easier to implement things, it becomes that much harder to stick to those principles. Because we used to be granted these constraints simply by the fact that it took a long time to build things.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And especially, in the early days of Basecamp, for example, we built the entire first version on me having 10 hours per week, not per day, per week, to build it. That is an enormous constraint on how you can do anything.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Because you can waste 10 hours really quickly just chasing things around or focusing on the non-essentials. If we wanted to get that product out, and we got it out in 380 hours, and the reason I remember this was, at the time, I was a contractor for 37signals. Jason had hired me at 15 dollars an hour, when I was in Copenhagen, Denmark, and he was in Chicago.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And by the way, I got paid in Apple gear. That was the other laugh, is like, "Don't even send me the money. I will just come to Chicago, and you'll give me an iPod, and a MacBook, and whatever." Anyway, that's how it got started, and therefore, I know exactly how much time we put into the first version.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And the first version was awesome because of that, because it had such constraints. Now, if you have 380 hours together with your 10 agents, you can build a monstrosity like that of something that does a million things for a million people, and therefore, that bloat just comes naturally in a way it didn't before.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And therefore, our task as software builders becomes so much more about distilling it, so much more about killing our darlings, killing features that we think are good but are just too much. And I saw this especially with the new version of Basecamp, Basecamp 5.

David Heinemeier Hansson: This is the first version we've been building with AI acceleration, and suddenly, we had designers who were able to take features all the way to completion and were at the cusp of shipping it when we kind of go reviewing and go like, "I'm not sure this actually fits." Like, this is expanding the balloon here. If we keep expanding that balloon, it's going to pop in a way where we lose the central selling point of Basecamp, which is it's just so easy to use.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And it's funny because sometimes you can have that as a high-minded intellectual guidepost. "Oh, we want something to be simple to use." Everyone says that, by the way. Anyone who builds software or builds anything is like, "Oh, yeah, our software is very easy to use." It doesn't matter if it comes from your mouth, it's not credible. But if it comes from the customer, it's very credible.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And when we do customer surveys, it is the number one reason why people continue to pick Basecamp, is it's simply simpler to use than the competition, and therefore, it's a joy to get others onto the platform with them because it doesn't require training sessions, and whatever. That's gotten so much harder to do, even for us, because I actually really like this notion of embracing constraints because I don't trust myself. I don't trust us. I don't trust Jason. I don't trust my own sensibilities that if I can do everything I want at very little cost, that I wouldn't.

David Senra: Wait, wait. Say more about not trusting yourself.

David Heinemeier Hansson: That the constraints on I don't have enough time, I don't have enough money, I don't have a big enough crew, is what forces that selection process. If you have unlimited time, unlimited money, and unlimited people, you're going to build a blob. This is actually the reason why when we got started, I was never worried about Microsoft.

David Heinemeier Hansson: When we got started, everyone was like, "But Microsoft's just going to make Basecamp a feature of Project or Teams or whatever."

David Senra: For context, in the early 2000s, when you started Basecamp, everybody's like, "Well, with the pitch, you know, it's like why are you going to write the software program? Microsoft's just going to do it," because they were just the dominant player.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: It sounds crazy today, but yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: It does.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: But our response was always, Microsoft's going to produce the kind of software that takes 50,000 people to make, because that's the size of their organization, so they can only produce that kind of software. I'm not worried about that. I'm worried, and still am, about a team of two, about a team of four, because they will produce software that's competitive with ours because it comes out of the same constraints, and therefore our threat doesn't come from the behemoth.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Now, is that true today when a much smaller team can act as a much larger company? I'm not quite sure, but I do know that I don't trust that if I was running Microsoft in 2004 that I wouldn't also have made the sprawling mess that is the Office. Or the joke today is I think they have four versions of Outlook.

David Heinemeier Hansson: They have Outlook New, they have Outlook New (Old), they have Outlook New (2026), right? How do you end up with such a mess? By having unlimited resources. It's a little bit like that resource curse, right? If you just have wealth springing out of the ground, well, you kind of don't need to bother with anything else, do you? You don't need to develop your economy. You don't need to develop your society. You can just sit back, relax, and let the money flow.

David Heinemeier Hansson: It's not a blessing, it's a curse. So, I don't trust ourselves to be able to channel that by default. So, this is why I'm quite skeptical about all this new AI acceleration we're having, is even us, I think it's quite likely that we could use it wrong to build too much software to get too far away from less software, learnable software that still has to fit in the mind of a human.

David Senra: Okay. I think that's a great point. I do think the complexity is because of the resources and the lack of constraints with success.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: So, I study a lot of the music industry because they're just crazy characters, and I love crazy characters. And I heard something Rick Rubin said about the first time he ever met Jimmy Iovine. Now, I've had both of them on the show, and I've become friends with Jimmy. And Jimmy is a decade older than Rick, so he did basically everything before Rick, a decade before Rick did.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And Rick tells the story the first time he met Jimmy Iovine, he was like, Rick was probably 19 or something, goes and plays music for Jimmy. And Jimmy, he said Jimmy's response to it was so surprising. He goes, "Man, I wish I could still make something that simple." And Rick's like, "I'm sure you can."

David Heinemeier Hansson: There you go.

David Senra: "You have."

David Heinemeier Hansson: There you go.

David Senra: So, even if you didn't make more money, the problem is you're iterating more and you're spending more time on it.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: I just listened to a podcast he did four years ago on the partnership between Ben Franklin and George Washington, because it was July Fourth.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: And I'm listening to it and I'm like, "F***. One, this is good. Two, it's good because it's simple. It's because of what I left out of it."

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: I think I'd f*** it up today.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes. And I think I had that analysis quite early because I saw it in things like movies. The first "Star Wars" movie is just incredible. When you think about the technology they had in the mid-seventies to produce a space odyssey as timeless as that, that still looks incredible. You put it on a big screen today, no one's going to like, "Oh, the effects look stupid." No, they're going to go, "The effects look incredible." And then you look at what George Lucas did when he had 100 times the budget.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: He had all the computers in the world and all the staff in the world to produce whatever Jar Jar Binks was in the 2000s, and it was awful. And that's exactly where that distrust of my own ability to handle increased capacity come from, because you can look at so many of the greats and go, "What they produced when they had nothing was truly spectacular." Another one I love is, James Cameron. The first "Terminator" movie is one of my favorite movies of all time. It was made on an absolute shoestring budget, and it still beats "Avatar" by a thousand times.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Now, there are also people who like "Avatar," and I'm sure James Cameron does. That's great. I don't. I like "Terminator," and I like it because it's low budget in a way that doesn't feel low budget. It's constrained, therefore you have to tell a tight story with a real focus on just that action flow, and it's incredible.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And it was exactly the same thing as I was saying earlier, where I read chapters we wrote for "Getting Real" back in 2006, and I think, "Damn it, I wish they came out that brief by default today." I have to work a lot harder now to be that succinct. I still want to, and it's also, as we talked about, there's also the formats where it's great to be able to pontificate at length.

David Heinemeier Hansson: But in writing, having that brevity, and in software, having that ability to distill and say, "No, no, no," is an incredibly rare gift, and it can be spoiled so quickly by an influx of money. This was one of the reasons why I was always so skeptical about venture capital when it came to software. Because I saw time and again, people raise an enormous amount of money, hire hundreds of people, and produce crap software.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And I thought, "If we're able to produce Basecamp," and by the way, by, I think 2007, we had four major projects, or products. We were launching one a year while we were also running Basecamp, while we were seven people at the company. So, my brain couldn't even comprehend: what do you do with 100 people? How do you even apply them towards software to make it good? And the answer was, in many cases, well, you don't.

David Heinemeier Hansson: You apply them towards software and crap comes out. Because there is not that funnel. There's not this narrow part that forces you to go like, "Well, I can't have it all. So now, I have to figure out, out of the 100 things customers are asking for, I can do three." Damn, they better count.

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David Senra: Tie this to what you were saying last night about there is some benefit to almost not changing any software, and you compared it to the fact that you keep...

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: You buy the same printer over and over again. Talk about your relationship with your printer.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Oh, my gosh. The Brother HL2340WD. I think that's the model number of my beloved printer. And the reason why it's so beloved is it was the first printer I ever bought that I just plugged in, and it worked. There was no f****** firmware, there was no nothing, there was just a functionality. I just need black and white prints, often because, for whatever reason, it needs a wet signature. So, I can't do DocuSign or whatever.

David Heinemeier Hansson: So, I print something out, I sign it, I scan it. That's the job. I am not interested in anything else this printer could conceivably do. I just want that to happen, and I want it to happen consistently, exactly the same way 10 years from now. This is a solved problem for me, and I love the printer. Even though I'm not a mega fan of Brother, it's not because it is some amazing piece of technology that is built in just this beautiful way. No, it just does a function.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And I think about that and my relationship to the printer every single time we move things around in Basecamp. Because I know we have a huge contingency of Basecamp customers who treat Basecamp like the printer. Once upon a time, they had a problem. Things were falling through the cracks. They weren't organizing well. They'd started the project on email, and it turned into a mess. And they looked around, maybe they got a recommendation from a friend. They signed up for Basecamp, and they went, "Yep, that's it. That's just the job."

David Heinemeier Hansson: And now they just use it. And they don't want things to move around all the time. They don't want all the new features that we're so excited about because it solves the one job that they have, and that's enough. Now, you gotta weigh that when you're making products with the fact that you've also got to sell to new people. And if you're trying to sell a product that looks like it's 15 years old to new people, that's a little difficult. But we've done it in multiple ways over the years.

David Senra: Yeah, how have you solved the problem?

David Heinemeier Hansson: We've tried all the options, but the one option I still really like was we rewrote the whole thing three times. So, there was the first version, came out in 2004.

David Senra: Which people are still paying you from the month...

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes. Yes. That's exactly the point.

David Senra: Okay.

David Heinemeier Hansson: So, we rewrote it three times, but we kept the old versions. Normally, what always happens in SaaS, and in software is a new version comes out and everyone just has to get it. They're forced to upgrade to it.

David Senra: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And you actually feel like, "I've lost control here. I bought a thing that did the job, and now you're making me learn things." The new version of Basecamp 5 is certainly better. It's a vastly superior product. I'm just not in the market for a better product. I'm in the market for the product I already bought. I don't want something different. I want the shitty thing I already have because I know all the ways it is broken, if it is, and I've made peace with that. So, for Basecamp, we kept those old versions.

David Heinemeier Hansson: The version we launched in 2004, we stopped selling in 2010. Sixteen years ago. We still have customers on it. As an individual business, it's still making millions of dollars.

David Senra: In profit.

David Heinemeier Hansson: In profit, because there's basically no expense to it, right? There's no additional development. There's a little bit of maintenance. You just got to keep sure it's secure, and bring it forward, and so forth. But it's basically pure product, because also, those people who've been using a product that's been discontinued for 16 years, they don't bother us very much. They're not like, "Oh, this thing, how do I use that?" No, they know how it works. That's why they keep with it.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And the magical thing for me is, in that cohort, 2004, 2010, there's a ton of people who love Basecamp. I get this all the time. "Oh, we use Basecamp. I love it." And I'll tell you, "Oh, did you try the new features?" They're like, "Oh, no, we use the old version." I'm like, "How old?" "Oh, yeah, the original. We signed it in like 2008." I'm like, "Wait, what? You haven't seen any of our good ideas in the last 16 years, and you're still over the moon about what we sell?" I think that's incredible. Now, it has trade-offs, right?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Like, there are software products that just get stuck with their initial cohort, and then they just age with that cohort, and I think that's fine, but it also just cuts you off from new customers. So, I want to have both things, and we do to some extent. We have three major versions of Basecamp. That initial version, then we did a Basecamp 2 that lived from 2010 to 2015, or '12 to '15, I think. Only three years. And then we have the current version of Chassis, as we like to call it, that we've involved twice, but it's still the one where we bring people forward. So, I've seen all of it.

David Senra: What's that word you just said? Shassy?

David Heinemeier Hansson: It's Chassis. That's what we call it. Like, you know how car makers...

David Senra: Oh, Chassis. Okay.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yeah.

David Senra: Okay.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yeah, I guess you might pronounce it.

David Senra: I thought you were saying sassy.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Sassy. It's a sassy chassis.

David Senra: Basecamp Sassy.

David Heinemeier Hansson: That it's the original code base, and therefore we're bringing customers along with it, and it totally has those trade-offs. We just had it. We just launched Basecamp 5. I think it's an incredible version of Basecamp, the best one we've ever made, and a substantial amount of the feedback was, "Why did you f*** with my printer?" "Yesterday, the button was here on the right. I just want to push that, and now you moved it somewhere else." And I go like, "I totally get it. I totally get it."

David Heinemeier Hansson: And I actually wish we had more of a capacity in software to accept finished products. This is one of my great envies of people who make physical products. By the time you ship, I don't know, a knife, it's done. There's no firmware upgrades. There's no patches.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: You may, I don't know, sharpen it over time. You may fix it if it breaks, but otherwise, that is a finished scope. Same thing with movies, same thing with music. You ship that album, it's done, right? I think there's something really beautiful about that, and people intuitively just understand that that's how it is with physical products or cultural products. With software, they don't get it. With software, if you don't upgrade, especially a SAS software in three months, you're like, "Is this dead? Is this out of business?"

David Heinemeier Hansson: No! f***, it's just good as it is. Can we leave it for a second? Can you appreciate just what you have? That would be great. And we have a fair amount of that software, because we've been in business for over 25 years, and we've created a bunch of things. And I've always thought, "You know what? Not everything that we've ever made is something we're going to want to continue to evolve forever." Fine. But we should keep it around, and this is one of the promises we've made to the customers we have.

David Heinemeier Hansson: We're going to keep it until the end of the internet. That's our moniker for this. Either that or as long as we're in business, whatever comes first.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And therefore, we allow someone who bought Highrise, for example. We made a CRM tool, a customer relations tool, that made millions of dollars, our second-biggest hit after Basecamp, that we ran for many years, and then at some point we were just done with that. Neither Jason nor I ended up using it, because we don't actually interact with that many people that we need to keep track of things. It had this core user base we're super happy with, and we're still running it for them. It's still a multimillion-dollar business, and I'm super happy, but it's frozen. It's done. It's finished software.

David Senra: It's funny that you made a CRM because I think you've said before that you don't like people.

David Heinemeier Hansson: That is one of the reasons why we haven't made version two of that. I mean, I like people actually in the abstract. It's funny, I've heard someone say that, "I don't like people in groups, I like them individually." I'm sort of the opposite. I like people in the abstract. Individually, I have more of a problem with it. So, I don't interact with that many people on a daily basis.

David Senra: How much of your time do you spend alone?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Oh, the vast majority. The vast majority. And in fact, it's funny because at 37signals we work remotely. We have about 60 people.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And twice a year, we all meet up and spend a week together, and it's really great. You get to see people, and I cherish that because you need that human connection. You need to sit right in front of someone to re-establish trust batteries and charge things up and realize it's not just all avatars and text. It's actually real people.

David Heinemeier Hansson: But at the end of that week, I'm always like, "As much as I love these people, as much as I love this company, I would f****** quit and live as a hermit in the forest rather than work with them 365 days a year in an office." I'm just not built that way. I am not built to be in an office and work with someone all the time. And in fact, when I look back upon my career, it only took off when I could close my door and not see anyone for long stretches of uninterrupted time.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I mean, when I got started working in technology, I worked in open offices. And do you know what? My productivity and my creativity was a bit of a flat line. I just got exhausted with having folks around, so...

David Senra: Hold on. Just go back to this. Let's say, hypothetically, you're up 16 hours a day. How many of those 16 hours are you alone?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Oh, man, at least, half of it, and the other half is spent with family. Like, the amount of hours per week that I spend with sort of strangers in longer interactions is small.

David Senra: Is that increasing with age, or were you always like this?

David Heinemeier Hansson: I was always like this. I was always an introvert. I always appreciated my own company, and I always appreciated just the lack of interruption, the lack of noise, and the lack of stimuli, really.

David Senra: I feel the same way. They watch my podcast, they're like, "You're not an introvert." I'm like, "No, no, I would spend half... Things have changed now because this new show's been f****** crazy. But before, I ran a solo history podcast with no employees.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: Spent half my waking hours alone in a room with books. Like, you see, books are everywhere.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yeah.

David Senra: And there's a great line by Kanye that sounds like something that you just said. He goes, "So much personality, what do you want from me? I can be by myself and enjoy the company." And it's just like... I just enjoy this better than most of my interactions with...

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: Especially, if you don't control the environment.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: Like, an open office.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes. I have a really deep-seated hatred of the open office. I worked in quite a few, and I ended up just with a burning desire to see it all just go up in smoke, and a commitment, in fact, to make sure I was successful enough that I never had to return.

David Senra: But remote work is everywhere now. They don't understand. You guys published a book called "Remote" in 2013, if I'm correct?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes, that's right.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Well before anyone did it. Now, what's funny is, I mean, I've seen the full cycle, right? So, during COVID, everyone goes like, "Actually, remote work's amazing, and we get just as much done."

David Heinemeier Hansson: And then as soon as that was over, we were like, "Oh, I guess we still have that 10-year lease. We better get people back into the office." Now, that's a bit of a cynical view. I totally get that there are individuals who thrive when they're around others, and actually, I think the common form of leaders and entrepreneurs is actually people who do like to be around others a lot, who do like to be interrupted. That's the mode they exist in. That's not my mode.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Paul Graham has this builder versus manager mode, or schedule. And the schedule is all about if you're a builder, and you get interrupted just a handful of times in a single day, that day is a waste, because you will never get into the flow. You will never get into this long stretch of uninterrupted time, and therefore, you will not feel in the, not just mood, but moment to solve the deep problems you got to deal with.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And that, to me, that was really the breakthrough for my career, certainly on programming, that I can't use a 45-minute chunk of time. An hour and a half even, I don't know. That's not going to turn out to something. If I have four hours, okay, now we're talking. I can actually attack a problem and feel like I can get all the way into it. And part of that is I hate repeating myself. This is one of the reasons when in the early days of 37signals, we did these workshops called Building a Basecamp.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Eight hours, we'd just go through everything that we learned building software products, and let's share. So, we build those up. I could stomach three, and by the third time, I was saying exactly the same thing according to a script, I was like, "I'm going to blow my brains out."

David Heinemeier Hansson: That does not have any stimuli for me. I can't do it. So therefore, I needed to not repeat myself. I needed to get into that novelty of it, and the ability to have these long stretches of uninterrupted time to do that, that's where I find it, right? Like that open space. The funny thing too is, it's not just people I can't have around to work, I can't even have a mess. This is why I posted some pictures of my office here in Malibu on Instagram.

David Senra: It still goes viral every few months.

David Heinemeier Hansson: It does. It actually just got picked up in sort of some content mill that keeps putting it out because it creates so much engagement. But one of the key moments, or points of feedback I would get on that is, "That's not a real office because there's not a mess." Like, "It doesn't look like the desk is used."

David Heinemeier Hansson: And I'm like, "Dude, you don't understand. If I have shit all over my desk, I'm not creating work because my mind will just go to the shit." And it's a bit of like that Marie Kondo, where you go through simplifying your home and throwing out all the stuff, and it actually creates free mental space. It does for me. And therefore, I need this pure cocoon.

David Heinemeier Hansson: It's actually a form of procrastination, and I need to run out of obvious things to procrastinate on before I'll start the real work.

David Heinemeier Hansson: This is also one of the reasons why I got so into building software tools, Ruby on Rails, everything else. Many of these tools are functions of procrastination. I have a thing I need to do. For whatever reason, I can't get started on it, but I can do all this other stuff around. "Oh, we need this wrench. I should just build the wrench." Like, "Yeah, yeah, let's wait with the table for a bit. I mean, I really need the table, but first I'm going to design a wrench from scratch so that I can put that damn table together."

David Heinemeier Hansson: And that can be a very productive form of procrastination, but it's also just a reality of how I'm able to produce work, and I've just come to terms with that, at peace with that, very early on in my career realizing I cannot work for eight hours a day sitting next to other humans.

David Senra: So, this reminds me of what I want to get to. So, you're close friends with Tobi Lütke. We've had amazing people so far on the show. I've enjoyed every single conversation. But that conversation with Tobi is the one that I don't think more than a week goes by without me thinking of it.

David Senra: When people are like, "Oh, what should I start with?" I'm like, "Just go there." I was on the phone with a founder who was asking for advice. I was like, "Man, I need more context of what's going on." I go, "But basically on what you just said," I go, "Just go watch this Tobi Lütke episode, then call me and we can talk."

David Senra: He texts me. He's like, "Within three minutes, Tobi's already dropping gems." And the reason Tobi's interesting to me, and I want to get to your relationship with him, and then his influence on your adoption of AI, is because one, he's your favorite founder's favorite founder, and so there's a lot of other founders that I admire.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: And my friend Karim, who's the founder of Ramp, which is my biggest partner. Karim, he's very similar to you. He's very similar to a lot of great entrepreneurs, like divinely discontent. He makes something. Everybody says, "This is great." He's like, "Ah, it could be better." And he's just never satisfied.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yeah.

David Senra: Therefore, he doesn't like a lot of other founders, doesn't like a lot of other products, but he speaks very highly of Tobi, and likes the way he thinks. And then when you realize about Tobi is, like... Everybody says, "Oh, I'm an independent thinker." But Tobi actually thinks through every single thing for himself, so therefore he has all these ideas and beliefs that are not correlated to one another.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Right.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: So, when I ask him a question, I have no idea...

David Heinemeier Hansson: That's the hallmark of a great debating partner.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: You don't know what they're going to say.

David Senra: Exactly. And that's why the conversation was incredible. I was like, "Oh, this is, this is phenomenal."

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: And if I didn't have to catch a flight, we would've... We were talking before and after. It was like, "Man, I have to have this conversation again." So, you said earlier, what I also admire about you, and I've been following you for a long time, is like you'll have an idea, an opinion, you're very f****** vocal about it. But then if you get new information, you'll immediately be as vocal as changing your mind.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Correct.

David Senra: And you mentioned that Tobi really influenced your thinking about using AI. Can you go into that?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes. So, I was excited, I think, in the abstract as anyone by the advent of AI. We get to see ChatGPT, and all of that early three-plus year ago enthusiasm for the general distribution of AI. Incredible. We can make computers do that? Wow, I love it.

David Heinemeier Hansson: But I had a far greater skepticism of how soon and how much it's actually going to have a material impact on how I write code, for example. And that was informed by what was present at the time. At the early stages of this AI revolution, we were getting auto-complete. You were sitting in Visual Code or Studio or whatever, and you were trying to write something, and the AI would be like this pestilent coworker who's like, "Let me drive. Let me write it for you." I'm like, "Can I just think for a second?"

David Heinemeier Hansson: Everything we just talked about, like that isolation, I want to be able to sit and I want to be able to think and not get constantly interrupted. It was that on steroids. It was the open office on steroids. It was everyone walking by like, "Hey, can I write on your keyboard?" "No, you can't. Get your grubby fingers off. I want to type this shit myself." So, I didn't like that at all, and I therefore locked in on thinking, "This is what AI's going to be."

David Heinemeier Hansson: And Tobi clearly saw much further ahead. His eyes were much further up. It's funny, now I'm racing with Tobi, and one of the things we talk about all the time is where are your eyes? The difference between a great racer and a mediocre racer is very often where do they look? If you're looking at the turn-in where you're supposed to turn, not at the apex, you're not going to hit it. It's like the old adage, you go where you look. So, this is why don't look at the tree, you'll steer right into it.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And training your eyes to look ahead, further ahead than what you think, is actually quite difficult in racing, and I think it's quite difficult in business, and life in general. And he had an eye that was just looking further ahead than I was, and he was going, "Yeah, but it's not going to be like this forever." Intuitively had this understanding of the evolution, and I'm still not entirely sure, like, what did he see? Like, why didn't I see it?

David Heinemeier Hansson: And I'm actually a little frustrated on my own behalf that I did not have the same conviction as Tobi did as early as he did towards seeing, yeah, yeah, you don't like it right now, but just imagine two more years of this. And he wrote a memo to the company internally, I think in '23 or early '24, way before agents doing the work on their own, going, "I've seen it. This is the big switch. This is what we've been waiting for. This is why I'm here as a CEO to identify those kind of discontinuations in the trend line, and we need to be a very different company to be able to position ourselves for that and take advantage of that."

David Heinemeier Hansson: And now I get a first row seat to the fruits of that. Being on the board of Shopify, I see just how far ahead they are on these. Half the time when I'm getting the presentation on the Shopify board of internal systems that Tobi has, it's like this is better than anything commercial.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Like, how do you have these incredible tools? They have a tool, for example, called Scout that analyzes the customer feedback they get such that their product managers are very well informed about what are people asking for. They're just sucking out from all these channels where they can ask it anything, "Oh, what do people think about this feature or this feature?" And then they get an answer. And I go like, "Damn it, I want to buy this. Can you please commercialize this?" They're like, "No, just kind of build it for ourselves."

David Heinemeier Hansson: Or River, the current system that they have for employing agents to do work and open PRs and everything. Like, everyone is working towards that. Shopify is already there. And the reason they're already there is that Tobi saw it just so much earlier than the rest of us. Now, there were other people who saw it, but most of them already worked in AI. Tobi was running this enormous company at the time, and it's actually quite difficult, I think, at least it looked difficult to me, to be able to be as focused as he is on that main business.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I mean, Shopify has a million things going on, and then also having your gaze that high up, looking that forward towards the next apex, what's coming, and then acting on it. And it was his incessant, "Oh, look at this, look at this, look at this," that got me from, "Yeah, I like AI, but it's sort of abstract," to, "Okay, fine, I'll install Pi. I'll install this. I'll install that. I'll give it a try." And then realizing, "Oh, actually, yes, this is going to change everything."

David Heinemeier Hansson: And that nudge, having someone just constantly nerd snipe you, as in like, "Hey, I know a little bit more," or not even a little bit, a lot a bit more about this specific thing, and I'm like, "That can't stand. I cannot be the person in this relationship who's not up to date on this shit." So, Tobi nerd sniped me into just leveling up and diving deeper and setting things up and giving it the extra try.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And so much of the ability to move your opinion comes from not these abstract ideas, but from touching things, from actually setting up OpenClaw or whatever, and getting some experience with it, and then having this instinctual feeling of where things are going to go that you're not going to get from just reading someone else do it. You can read a write-up of anyone else using something else, but it's kind of like trying to learn how to drive a race car by reading a book about it.

David Heinemeier Hansson: You could pick up some pointers, but until you get behind the wheel, it's not going to internalize. It's not going to be something you can actually perform. So, I credit Tobi heavily with that, just being a guiding star. And what's so incredible too is he's not running a startup. Well, he is. He would probably say that he is in some sense, in like abstractly, right? Like day one kind of thinking, but it's a company of 7,000 people.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Most companies, even technology companies that get to that stage and has that level of both history, Shopify's been around for 20 years, is that large, 15% of world GDP on e-commerce, is occupied with the problems they have at hand. So, to be able to be further ahead than, like, I felt like I should have been running a much smaller company was a great way to sort of almost shame me into getting up to speed. So thanks, Tobi.

David Senra: The best businesses I've studied all figured out the same thing early. Your team is only as good as the information they're working from, and today, that team includes people and agents. But most generic agents only have limited information and don't know the most important aspects of your business, like your actual customer conversations, your sales history, what worked last quarter, and what didn't. This is what HubSpot fixes. It connects AI to your real customer data.

David Senra: So, when you ask AI to write an email, it knows this customer asked about pricing three weeks ago, it knows what campaign brought them in, and it knows that customer already contacted support twice this month, and that changes everything for a startup. When you're hiring, new team members can see how you actually sell. When you're fundraising, your data is clean and ready, and when you're scaling, you're building on something designed to grow with you, not rebuilding from scratch.

David Senra: It's the same platform that more than 300 startups who have grown to over a billion dollars in valuation grew their businesses on. And now, HubSpot for startups offers this service at up to a 90% discount exclusively for eligible startups. Visit hubspot.com/startups to learn more. That is hubspot.com/startups.

David Senra: Have you had a chance to nerd snipe him back since then?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes, on Linux.

David Heinemeier Hansson: So, I switched to Linux about two and a half years ago, and first I had this soft on-ramp, as most people switch to Linux. I used Ubuntu. That's the most popular Linux distribution. It's fine. I mean, actually, it's great in many ways because Linux has all these different distributions. They have Ubuntu and Fedora and Red Hat and whatever, but it's all the Linux kernel.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Like, the magic of Linux is the Linux kernel and then the ecosystem of all these tools that are around it, and whether you package them in this one way or package them in this other way is not the make-or-break of it. So, just getting into Linux, for me, was a huge thing.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I'd been on the Mac for well over 20 years. I was completely a MacHead, as in thinking this is... A Mac is a computer. I don't want to use another computer. Windows certainly is not for me.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I don't know; Linux is for people who like pocket protectors and is just the kind of nerd that I can relate to. I can respect it, but it was not a me thing. Then finally, Apple pissed me off enough that I thought I cannot in good conscience, continue to spend money on their products if I have such deep disagreements with how they run the company.

David Heinemeier Hansson: So fine, I'm going to try something else, and as I said, "I gave Windows two weeks," and I realized, "Man, shit, I can't do it." I'm going to come crawling back to the Mac if there's not something else.

David Heinemeier Hansson: But thankfully, there was Linux. So, I discovered Linux, spent five minutes realizing, "Okay, maybe I can do this." After two weeks, I'm like, "Okay, fine. I can. I'm committing to it. I'm going to burn the boats. Off with the Mac computers, committing to Linux," and then, of course, just getting completely sucked in. Oh my God, I can do everything on this thing.

David Senra: But didn't you say you discovered a subreddit or something like that, really, was the turning point in this, correct?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: One of the reasons I've loved Apple as a company and their stewardship of the industry was their design, was their taste. They make beautiful products, mostly.

David Heinemeier Hansson: They certainly make still beautiful hardware, and for a very long time, they were also the leading bar for software quality. Just sweating the details and making sure everything was aesthetically pleasing, which to me is an incredible part of why I like computers in the first place. I like all the little subtleties. I like just the right font, just the right border curvature.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I like things to look nice and behave nicely, and Apple, for the longest time, was the undisputed leader in that, especially when you compared it to Windows, which was the epitome of having no taste, of having no sensibilities about how things should look and having no cohesive vision for what a computer should be. It was all these disjointed parts.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And then I find Linux, and I look, man, this is like even a Temu version of Windows. It looks like a cheap copy of something Redmond would have made, and that was already crap. Why would I want that?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Well, on Reddit, there's this amazing subreddit called r/unixporn, and it's basically a showcase for these nerds who spend, in many cases, hundreds of hours personalizing their Linux distribution and setup to the point that it doesn't look like anything else you've ever seen, to the point where it looks like it was made for a movie, like a hacker movie where you see all "The Matrix" characters scrolling down the screen, and it just looks cool.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Now, sometimes it just looks cool, and it doesn't actually work that great, but when I discovered that, I went, "If these nerds are individually able to make Linux look this cool, if I just take it back 20%, not as over the top as what they're trying to do, and bake it all into Linux, we can make something that's competitive with the Mac."

David Senra: Hold on. You said something interesting when I interviewed you real quick: that they were like kids. You told me this story about some 22-year-old Polish kid who smoked Apple.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes. So, this is one of the other things I love about this ecosystem. Everyone goes by a handle. It's like the early days when I got into computers. The reason I actually got into computers was for video games, and I didn't have enough money to buy the video games, so I got into pirated video games, which meant I got into the warez scene. It's with a Z at the end. Everyone had a handle because it was kind of illegal. You were trading copyrighted goods. My handle, by the way, was "Webster." I don't know why that was or whatever I...

David Heinemeier Hansson: It was "Webster." And everyone else in that scene had a handle, and I hadn't really thought about handles in a long time. The demo scene at the time had the same thing, but then I discovered this Unixporn and this subculture of people who work on this, and they all had handles.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And this one Polish kid who goes by the handle of “Vaxry’s” had built the tool that three-quarters of everyone on this Unixporn subreddit was using to build their rice. That's what it's called, the rice. They rice out the Linux distribution. It's called Hyprland. And it's just this one... I mean, I call him a kid. He's 22 at the... But when he first made the first version, I think he was 19, 18.

David Heinemeier Hansson: One kid, out of Poland comes up with this window manager, which, in its essence, is not a new concept. There have been these tiling window managers on Linux for a long time, where basically, you don't move windows around with your mouse; they tile. So, you open a new window, and they reposition, and all the windows are already available. But they all look, again, like they were made by people who did the Temu version of Windows. Just not aesthetically pleasing. Maybe highly functional, maybe fast, and maybe productive for certain people, but I need the aesthetics to live. I need it to be beautiful.

David Senra: And Apple never did this the way you'd like it.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And Apple never did this. Apple has been stuck, as has Windows largely, although they're sort of trying to ape some of these things, in the original Xerox pattern. Like, here's Windows: you have a mouse, you drag a window around, and a lot of the interaction with the operating system is the mouse.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And the mouse is an incredible tool for learnability. Anyone who has just a rough conception of how I move this thing around, they can use almost any app because everything is sort of explained. But if you're interested in productivity, it's a terrible tool. This is why all the cracked programmers are all about their keyboards, right? And they're all about hotkeys and shortkeys, and they require a lot of investment to learn, but if you learn them, you can fly.

David Heinemeier Hansson: It's just like putting on a goddamn wingsuit, and you go 200 miles an hour, and there are cliffs all around, and it's not explained how everything works. You have to learn; you have to internalize it. And I was like, "I've been using a computer for, I don't know, 40 years. I've always used a keyboard, yes, but I've not been driving my computer through the keyboard. I've always had that little mouse."

David Heinemeier Hansson: And here is an operating system, Linux plus Hyprland, where I can drive it all through the keyboard, and it can, A, be super fast and easy to use because everything's just a keyboard command. It can look amazing, and the core engine to make that work, that tiling window manager, Hyprland, is made by this crack kid from Poland who goes by a handle and has an anime avatar. I love it. I mean, it's just such a throwback to what computers used to be when they were more about fun and this artsy expression.

David Heinemeier Hansson: The funny thing about the original ware scene, the pirated software scene, was that it was kind of overlapping with the demo scene, and the demo scene was all about: how do we use these wildly underpowered by today's standards computers to make incredible computer graphics? So, they put out these demos, and these two scenes would meet.

David Heinemeier Hansson: The demo scene would produce the intros to the cracked games, such that you'd see this really cool video before the game loaded up that basically said, "This game was cracked by EvilHead24," right? And I'd just like, "Wow, it looks so cool." This is a resurgence of that computers can be fun in that way, and they can be a bit whimsy, and they can be made by pseudo-anonymous individuals.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And the combined sum of it can be better than the top five most valuable companies in the world, a trillion-dollar organization that has 40 years of history caring about this and unlimited resources, unlimited people, and still the crack kid from Poland can beat him.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Absolutely amazing. So then once all those pieces started falling together, I was not just sold; I flipped. As you said, I used to have a perception of Linux that this is a server tool. I used it on all the servers we've ever run, Linux. But running it on the desktop, that sounds like something for people who like to update the firmware on their printer. Not f****** me, man. I don't want to update the firmware on my printer. I just want the things to work.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And I realized, you know what? That's not all Linux could be. Linux just has all the "LEGO" pieces. Someone could put those pieces together for you, and you could get the Millennium Falcon or the Taj Mahal or something incredible that looks great and is ready to play with. And I went like, "Well, okay, if no one else is going to do that, I will." I'll take half of Unixporn, I'll take Vaxry's cracked Hyprland, and I'll slap it on top of Arch Linux, and we're going to make Omarchy. And that's what I've spent a shocking number of hours over the last year building.

David Senra: Thousands.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Thousands. Yes, that's probably fair at this point, that it became an obsession, and it became an obsession in the same way we were talking about, where it's not because I had a grand roadmap, "Oh, I need to do this and this." I just picked up the thing and went, "Here are 75 things that are wrong. This thing is slightly misaligned. This is not right. The colors are not correct. It's not all integrated. The themes aren't coherent," and so on. And then I fixed five of them, put it back down. It's like, "Oh, that's better."

David Heinemeier Hansson: It's more pleasurable to use. Picked it up again, fixed another five things. Picked it up, picked it up, picked it up, until I finally had something that felt like, "This is good." And not only is it good, but it's goddamn better than whatever else is available commercially, certainly than what Apple has to do. And again, better is this: it's better for me.

David Heinemeier Hansson: But what I always realized is that every single piece of product that I've built started there. I have to make something that's better for me, and if I can get beyond that point, that I would rather use this than that, I know I'm not alone. I know I'm not that special. I know that there's going to be tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, potentially even millions of other programmers or just computer users who like computers.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Who's going to be like me? Who's going to appreciate the same aesthetics? Who's going to appreciate having an operating system they actually own, that can migrate, especially now with agents that can make bespoke and their own, but they just don't want to put in 2000 hours upfront to get access to that kingdom. So, if I give it all to them in a prepackaged omakase, ready-to-use, chef's choice edition, then they can get invited to it. And I did exactly the same thing with Ruby back in the day. There are great parallels between these things.

David Heinemeier Hansson: When I first picked up Ruby back in the early 2000s, it was an obscure programming language out of Japan that only a handful of people in the West were using. And it didn't have a killer app. It looked really good, and people were using it for small things here and there. And then I went, "This is incredible. This guy has the right vision for what a programming language should be." If I take it and apply it to the thing I want to build, web applications, I want to build Basecamp, and then I build the tooling around it, I can get other people to realize the magic of what's here."

David Heinemeier Hansson: And it's exactly the same thing with Omarchy. Linux is incredible. It is one of the seven wonders of the software world. It is the largest open-source code base in the world. It's like 40 million lines of code.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Like, literally millions of man-hours have been poured into that collective process in a way that was not always obvious; it was going to work. We talked about Microsoft a bit. The famous quote from Steve Ballmer back in the early 2000s was that, "Linux was a cancer, that it was going to eat everything, it was going to be very disruptive and very negative for the software industry," and it turned out exactly the opposite. Today, Linux runs on billions of devices. Basically, anything embedded is Linux. Anything on the server is Linux.

David Heinemeier Hansson: The one final thing it hasn't cracked is the desktop. And I just go, "Why? Why shouldn't it?" We can just make it so good that at least technically minded people will realize that this is just a better option, and they'll pick it. Of course they'll pick it, because if I show them something that's better, of course they'll realize. I mean, that's a pretty naive instinct to have, but that's my driving principle. If I make something better, people are going to realize it's better, and they're going to use it.

David Senra: Okay. But this is actually really important, because last night I kept going back... Basically, I have these conversations selfishly. There's shit in this person's head that is valuable to me. I can pick out; you might give me 50 ideas, I might grab two, and use them in my life, and my life is better as a result of that.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Right.

David Senra: And so, I'm intensely interested in that. So, last night I kept asking you a question. I wasn't getting the right answer. I was just trying to figure out what actually drives you, right? You mentioned earlier, I thought this was absolutely ridiculous, where people forever would describe you and Jason, and the business you built, as a lifestyle business. It's like, I don't know, the guy started out making 15 dollars an hour, now he has a 15 million dollar car. What kind of lifestyle is that to you? You live in a one-bedroom apartment and have to kiss a species' ass so that you can make payroll next month.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Right.

David Senra: Which lifestyle do you want? I don't know what you're talking about here. I thought that critique was pretty weak if you actually analyze what's going on. But what I realized is it's not money. Obviously, you grew up without money. I grew up without money. Once you get money, you realize, yeah, it's valuable, but it's like the return on it diminishes really, really rapidly, right?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Right.

David Senra: So, you're definitely not driven by money. I was like, "Okay, well, this guy's just introverted and just loves making things." You're definitely driven by making things.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: But then you have this other element that maybe, in my opinion, tell me if I'm wrong, you have this fierce desire or almost need for control and independence and freedom, right?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: And so we started talking about Omarchy. Am I saying it correctly? Last night, and then you realized to the point where we're like, "Yeah, if anything happened with Basecamp, I wouldn't start another business because I wouldn't want customers."

David Heinemeier Hansson: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

David Senra: So, me and Rob, my partner Rob, he was over here this morning. We were laughing about what you said last night, so I want to get to that, where you're just like, "Yeah, it's like you have f***-you money and you have financial independence, but then there's another thing that you transcend. You don't even have any customers."

David Heinemeier Hansson: Right.

David Senra: And your whole thing is just the love of making something for yourself and then putting it out to the world, making something great.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: And the reason I bring this up is because explain why you named it Omarchy.

David Heinemeier Hansson: So "Omarchy" is three words put together. It's omakase, which is chef's choice in Japanese, and it's usually applied to restaurants. Like, you go to a sushi restaurant, and they just start serving you great food because they know better. They've been making this goddamn sushi for a very long time, and the chef who gets to be the one who picks it has probably been making it for decades.

David Heinemeier Hansson: What do you know? You don't know shit. You don't know what's good. You don't know what order it should come in. You should just sit down and hand over your sovereignty for this meal to this person who's more competent than you, and then open your trap and eat it. And it'll be delicious. This is actually the best way to experience all sorts of things. There are people in this world who have spent more time than you getting really good at figuring out what quality is, and they hand you that quality so you can just enjoy it.

David Heinemeier Hansson: What I found is that a lot of people have a very difficult time articulating what they want, but they can appreciate quality instantly. They can just know, "Oh, this is good. Yummy. This is some great sushi," right? They don't know what to ask for, how to season it, or whatever. Funny anecdote, one of the things that always tripped me up when I came to the US originally, that will crack Jason up, is the notion of the construction kit burger.

David Heinemeier Hansson: So, my mind was blown when I came to the US from Denmark, and I would order a burger, and I would just be handed the parts. Like, "Here's the bun, here's some lettuce, here's some pickles, here's the meat." And I'm like, "What is this? A construction kit? Am I supposed to put it together myself? You can't even assemble my food for me?" And I'm like, there's something deeply American about this, like, "No, I know best." No, you don't know shit. You are ignorant as f***.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Let a chef prepare the food for you. Goddammit, why would you want to get your hands dirty like this? So, I had that reaction right from the get-go that I love delegating my limited sovereignty when I don't know something, or I don't know more than the other person about a given thing, right? I want the best people in the world to prepare the services and products and food that I then get to enjoy. Because it's like leveling up, cheating almost, right? And I thought, "You know what?

David Heinemeier Hansson: I really like that principle, and I will also apply it in reverse on my own accord, that if I know something about programming, about using Ruby, or about using Linux, I can pour all of that competency into a package that you just have to sit and enjoy." So, that's what omakase is.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Then the other part is Arch. We talked about that. That's the Linux distribution run by a gang of volunteers for the past 20-plus years. It doesn't have an organization. It doesn't have a lot of fundraising. It doesn't have a commercial structure around it. It's just a bunch of nerds who share the burden of distributing Linux. Amazing.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And then the last bit is Hyprland. So, that's [unintelligible] Omarchy, and it turns into being this sort of constellation where I take... There's a trillion tools in Linux land. There's a million ways you can configure your system. You can have all these themes and apply them. I will pick them for you.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I will not give you a construction kit burger. I will give you an omakase sushi meal, and you may do substitutions. You may realize, "Ah, I don't like that..." Fine, fine, fine. But you're going to start from a base that works. You're going to install this system, by the way, in four minutes. This was one of the things I got obsessed with really early on.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I would get a new Mac computer. I actually just got a new one for some testing I needed to do, and I would set it up. I think the last one took 42 minutes to set up because it needed a software update and it needed some things. I'm like, "This is unreasonable." These computers are about a trillion times faster than what put us on the f****** Moon, and you're telling me it takes 42 minutes for a new computer to be ready to use?

David Heinemeier Hansson: This is preposterous. So, I just got obsessed with this: how quickly can we install a system that's fully ready to go and use? And we got it down to about two minutes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: You insert that USB key with Omarchy on it. You fill out. Well, this is my username and my password, and then two minutes later, you're ready to rock. All of it is there, right? And I just thought, so many of these things we just take for granted. Oh yeah, getting a new computer, it's just hours of work setting it up and getting it ready for real work. No, it's not. Someone could just do that for you, and collectively, we could save trillions of man-hours every year.

David Heinemeier Hansson: This is part of why I love actually sharing these things, because I get this indignation about world productivity. When we're subjecting humans everywhere, millions of them, maybe even billions of them, to shitty tools and shitty setup processes, we're robbing the world of progress. You could have taken those trillion hours that people have spent 42 minutes setting up a new computer and applied them towards productive outcomes, and I don't know, we'd have flying cars by now.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And I just feel like, do you know what? If I can assist in that process somewhat and take some of that drudgery out of the world gears, I've done my little part. I've added a little bit of oil so that everything glides a little more seamlessly, and especially if we do it in a way that's aesthetically pleasing, I've actually contributed to delight and lightness in the world. We should all be surrounded by beautiful things, including beautiful computers that just work out of the box and are ready to use.

David Heinemeier Hansson: So, that became sort of that dual mission. A, I wanted the very best computer for me. Suddenly, I had found all these building blocks where everything I was ever annoyed about with how the computer worked, I realized I could change it. All the code was there. Everything could be rewritten and reconfigured so I could get exactly what I wanted, and that just became an obsession.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I have this affliction where, when I see something that's not quite right and I have the power to fix it, nothing else matters until it's perfect. I will polish that thing until every single quarter millimeter is perfectly round, and I just cannot do anything else. And in fact, it's not always great, I will say.

David Heinemeier Hansson: As a person who has other obligations in life than writing Linux, there were moments of that journey where I essentially just went on a hermit trip and just went, "I will learn everything there is about this. It's just that I can make the perfect computer."

David Heinemeier Hansson: And it becomes a bit of an obsession, and thankfully, it doesn't last because at some point, like the ball literally is a perfect sphere, and it's beautiful, and it has just the right texture and light and color. And then I go, "Okay, now I've made this beautiful thing, and I enjoy it more than anything else. This is the best computer I've ever used in my life."

David Heinemeier Hansson: So, if it's so good for me, it should be good for other people. I should share it. And so, I did with Omarchy, and what's funny was I actually made a version before Omarchy called Omakub, where I took that Ubuntu thing we talked about, like that thing everyone who starts on Linux uses, and I tweaked it a little bit and made it look more a little bit like Windows or a Mac.

David Senra: Mm.

David Heinemeier Hansson: It felt familiar. And the misconception that I had, and I think a lot of people in the Linux world have had, if we just make it as close to Windows or Mac as possible, then they'll come. But no, they won't. Why would you want, again, the Temu version of Mac or of Windows? I don't need a cheaper version. Then you have to appeal to these high-minded ideas. "Well, it's free software as in speech, not as in beer." Yeah, okay, there's 0.001% of the population that gives a f*** about that.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Most people just want the best thing, and your job is to give them that if you want to win them over. So, I just went like, "No, let's make something that's radically different." This computer will not work like anything you've used before. In fact, you won't even be able to operate it right out of the box because it's all keyboard-driven, and you'll have your little mouse, and you're like, "There's nothing on the screen. Where are the icons to click on?"

David Heinemeier Hansson: And I will go like, "No. Here, let me show you a cheat sheet. You have to learn these 15 key bindings. Before you can do anything on this computer, here's your syllabus. Sit down and study, boy. And by the time you have learned the first lesson, you are ready to use this computer. And we've already forked the timeline, right? I've already said like, every other computer in the world is very focused on like, "Oh, let's make it as approachable and as learnable as possible." And I go like, "No, f*** that. That option is covered. It's great, but let's get something else. Let's build something else."

David Heinemeier Hansson: And then it took off, and I found that that's very often true about products. You enter some domain, and you think like, "Oh, I can just... Who's the best? Can I just copy them and then I'll do a slight tweak?"

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

David Heinemeier Hansson: That's not going to work. That's not going to unseat anything, right? All the best ideas that actually turn out to have an impact on something, they sound stupid at first. They're not intuitive because that's where all the value has been locked up. It's been locked up in this misconception about what people actually want because most people don't know what they want.

David Heinemeier Hansson: You actually have to give it to them in a form that's beautiful and approachable and quirky and a little bit weird and maybe a little bit off-putting at first. I find that in all sorts of different domains. Some of my favorite car designs, when they first premiered, were the McLaren 720S; it has these sunken-in headlights that, when I first saw it, I thought, "This is the ugliest car I've ever seen at this level."

David Heinemeier Hansson: Now it's one of my favorite car designs of all. So, I think you have to be able to work in that space where you have a high tolerance for people telling you what you're building is stupid, what you're building is ugly, what you're building is never going to work in the real world.

David Heinemeier Hansson: When I get that feedback, I know I'm onto something. Now, you can't just get that feedback. There's also got to be a few people who like what you're doing. But Kathy Sierra, who is one of my all-time greatest writers on what animates users and good products and so forth...

David Senra: I'm going to interrupt you because this is the power of ideas. This is why I'm addicted to podcasting.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: Because I didn't know who the hell Kathy Sierra was until I learned about her through you and Jason's writing. Then I go consume her, and you're like, "The best way to market is to out-teach your competition."

David Heinemeier Hansson: Oh, she's amazing.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Bam!

David Senra: That's all I do.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Bam!

David Senra: That's literally what I do.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Bam!

David Senra: That f****** idea helped build both the first podcast, which then helped in turn build this podcast. It was super valuable to me.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: It built all of 37signals.

David Senra: If you could buy that idea in my life literally, it's worth tens of millions of dollars to me.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes. And it's all down to Kathy Sierra, and her writings on the internet in the mid-2000s. So, outspend versus out-teach, just to linger at that, because I think it applies to all of this, as you said, applies to podcasting, it applies to Basecamp. We talked about...

David Senra: Every f****** thing.

David Heinemeier Hansson: It applies to everything because when we launched Basecamp, we didn't have any money. We had a tiny team, and Microsoft had all the money and all the whatever. They could swallow us up.

David Heinemeier Hansson: What we then had to fight back with was not more banner ads, right? We're not going to outspend them on a marketing campaign. That was never going to happen, but we could out-teach them. We could have better insights, and we could share them, and people could resonate with that and then reciprocate by buying our products, at least some percentage of them, even if it's a small percentage. That has been our operating strategy for literally two decades, and it's exactly the same thing.

David Senra: I have to interrupt you again.

David Senra: It's also better for the world because you guys are putting so much work... You're capturing a tiny percent of the value that you've created. You put out so much more value. Now, even a tiny percent of a huge number gives you a 15 million dollar car, which you won't have to keep hitting on, right?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: But the world is big. The internet is very big.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes. Yes.

David Senra: But I told Jason this, who I've now become friends with and just love spending time with. We just had lunch together, and I went to go look at the construction project he's doing right now.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And I was like, "Dude, I was by myself. I didn't have any employees for 10 years. You make project management software. My project's in my f****** head. All I could do is buy your books," which I did.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yeah. Yeah.

David Senra: But I was like, "I'm so glad." As soon as you did, "Hey," I was like, "Oh, now I can give you money."

David Heinemeier Hansson: Right.

David Senra: You're hitting on something that's really important, that why what Kathy says is valuable, and this is something that Charlie Munger would talk about, who's my hero, is just like, "If I can only learn from one person, it'd be Charlie Munger."

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yeah.

David Senra: And he's like, "There's a deep desire in human nature that is ever present and never changing, and it's the desire to reciprocate."

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: I feel you have done something for me by writing those books, by going on those podcasts, by talking at "Startup School."

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Right.

David Senra: And as soon as you give me an opening to reciprocate, I will do so. I'm really tight with the Spotify team, right?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: Daniel, Gustav, all the top people there, Alex, everybody else, Roman. And I f****** fly to Europe. I've been there four times in 14 months just to talk about podcasting, because I'm obsessed with this.

David Senra: And the crazy thing in these common conversations is there's just, what a weird thing that we see in podcasting is they have private feeds, and you can do a... This content's free. If you want to buy another podcast, it's X amount of dollars per month.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Mm-hmm.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Right.

David Senra: Most people never even listen to the content. They're just looking for an excuse because your podcast gave them so much value.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Right.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: That will always work. It worked today; it worked 100 years ago, and it will work 100 years from now.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Right.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I choose to believe that. I don't actually know if it's true, but I think it is how we've built a business up until this point. I will say that I'm starting to see some cracks in that reciprocal exchange.

David Senra: Tell me about that.

David Heinemeier Hansson: It's not because the human part of the link is broken; it's because the algorithms have changed things. So, for Jason and me, for the longest time, what we did was exactly that. We're just going to out-teach. We're going to put out so many observations, lessons, experiences, software, open-source, whatever, into the world, and we're just going to hope that a small percentage of that trickles back.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And it used to work, especially on Twitter, where you'd build up a following, and if someone followed you, they'd see all the stuff you were sharing. This is Gary Vee's "Jab, Jab, Right hook."

David Senra: Yeah.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And you do all the jabbing. You do all the, "Here's free stuff, here's free insights, here's free observations, here's free software," and then occasionally you'd go like, "And now, we have a new version of Basecamp. Check it out." Right? What's broken now on the social platforms is that my followers don't see anything I post unless it goes medium-viral because everyone is now in the algorithmic feeds.

David Heinemeier Hansson: So, I follow someone; it's just like this little drop in the signal, and it kind of breaks that reciprocal exchange, at least on those social platforms. This is one of the reasons why I love podcasting. There you have subscribers who actually get things straight into their feed. It's not algorithmic, and I love newsletters.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I have a newsletter as well. I have a bunch of my long-form writing go into that because then I'm assured that at least it shows up in their inbox, but both of those outlets are minority outlets compared to the behemoth that is social media, and I've seen some of it break down a little bit.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I don't know what that means. I'm going to continue regardless of whether it works as well as it did in the past, it does in the future, and I'm still going to bet on the fact that someone who does get exposed to the ideas we have or the free software that we give away is going to feel some connection to what we have. And then if there is an opportunity, maybe not even for themselves, but they spotted in others, like as you said, "Hey, I'm one person, I don't need Basecamp."

David Heinemeier Hansson: But you hear of someone who's complaining about setting up projects on complicated ClickUp or not working email, and you go like, "You should check out Basecamp."

David Senra: We're starting to use it for the podcast because we're vastly increasing the amount of episodes we're doing and the amount of people I have to stuff the top of my funnel for interesting people I want to talk to.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Oh, you are?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Amazing.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: And me and Rob, who we had dinner with last night, we go back and forth, and we're going over text message, and then the other day I was like, "Bro, what happened?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Right.

David Senra: Like, I think we're losing the thing here." He's like, "We should use Basecamp."

David Heinemeier Hansson: You're the classical example.

David Senra: This is the point, though. You guys have provided so much value to our lives. We're not like, "Oh, maybe we use Basecamp," or, "Let me go look around." It's like I don't even give a shit.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Right.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Right.

David Senra: These are my guys. I'm just going to use their thing.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Right.

David Senra: Deel is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade, and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, ElevenLabs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deel. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deel after using their product, and what they discovered is that Deel is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring.

David Senra: Deel will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world, so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best: delivering value to your customers. The founder of ElevenLabs has a great description of the value Deel can give your company.

David Senra: He said, "We built ElevenLabs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deel enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world." Deel is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deel.com/senra. That is deel.com/senra.

David Senra: I want to go back to a fundamental understanding of you, though, because I love this transcendence of your... You deeply desire independence and freedom and control. And so, that's why you're anti-investors, and you don't have a board of directors.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: It's just you and Jason making all the decisions, right? But then you introduced this other level of transcendence last night. It's like, oh, no investors is one level of freedom. How about no customers is even higher. So, your point is, I'm going to put 2,000, 4,000 hours of my time into this. I'm going to craft it. I'm going to make sure everything is perfect, and then I'm going to give it to you.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: But then you said something last night where you're just like, well, what if they have feedback for you? Like, what was your response to that?

David Heinemeier Hansson: I love feedback if it's well grounded in solid observations that can give me new insights. But a lot of feedback you get on the internet does not fall into that category. It's just like, you looked at this for five minutes. I spent 4,000 hours, and you have some knee-jerk reaction, and you want to tell me how to do it? You want to tell me what I should do and what I shouldn't do? Well, you can go f*** yourself. Right? And I actually get that indignation just stemming up. I've been working on it.

David Heinemeier Hansson: But just this sense of, like, this is not a reciprocal exchange. I gave you something of tremendous value. Now, you can choose to ignore it or say it's not right for you. That's completely fair, right? Like, that's a good exchange. Like, okay, thanks for the gift, but no, thanks. But if you take my gift of 4,000 hours, and you go, like, "Well, I'll give you five minutes, and then I'll just dump shit on you." What? You didn't pay me anything. Like, that's a privilege you have to pay for.

David Heinemeier Hansson: If you want to tell me ill-considered feedback on anything I make, you got to pay me. And you can do that with Basecamp, and you can tell me...

David Senra: And then you're a customer.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And then you're a customer, and then I know we have a different relationship now. I will actually say thank you, even though I think maybe a knee-jerk reaction too on my part, that this is not the most well-considered piece of advice. I will take it in because we've had an exchange, and there's a reciprocal nature there. But I actually appreciate more to transcend above that, and I don't have that obligation with you. I am sharing something with you, and I don't owe you anything.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I mean, you technically don't owe me anything either if you don't accept the gift, but if you take the gift, you actually do owe me something. You do owe me just a modicum of respect to look at this for more than five minutes before you just dump your shitty ideas onto me, or even worse, it's not so much about the ideas; it's when people try to tell me what to do. It goes straight back to...

David Senra: No, this is what I hit on last night.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: That is it.

David Heinemeier Hansson: That's the nerve, right?

David Senra: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: The nerve is, I have worked very hard, in not just my life, but in business, to have damn near close to total independence, so no one can tell me what to do. No one can tell me no. No one can tell me what to work on. No one can tell me what to do. And Jason and I have structured our entire business around that concept of pure independence. We don't have any investors who get to tell us what to do. We don't have a board to tell us what to do.

David Heinemeier Hansson: We do have customers, and they get some claim some of the time to tell us, at least in aggregate, what to do, because if no one wants to buy the things that we're putting out there, like, the business is not going to continue. So, they get some good influence there. I find that tolerable. That's a tolerable exchange. I put a product into the world. You pay me some money. I will listen to you. Fair. But I appreciate the transcendence to the next level.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I don't even have a commercial relationship with you anymore. We can still have a great relationship. One of the reasons I enjoy open source software so much is because I get to collaborate with like-minded people about making things better, right? So, if I give you the gift of 4,000 hours on Omarchy, and you then tweak a few things, and you send a pull request back on GitHub and say, "Here's something," I go, "Awesome. Now we're in business. Now we have a little club. Let's make this amazing together." And that feels so pure.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And not because I'm against capitalism at all. I'm a huge fan of capitalism. But I've also realized at some point, when I retire, it will actually be a retirement from capitalism. It'll be a retirement from customers and the economic exchange. And 37signals is quite likely my last business. I made the money I needed to make to live the life I...

David Senra: Three times.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes. That I would enjoy to live for the rest of my time, right? So, at some point, either the business ends just because circumstances end, or Jason or I just get tired of it, and then I will transcend to the next stage of not having any customers at all, and then continue to make things and continue to share things, but without any claim other people have on my time or my attention or where I want to go with it.

David Senra: Okay, so this leads us to what I... Another thing I want to talk to you about, which is that capitalism actually works, right?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: And what I like about you is, like, people in the tech industry act like they don't like money, right? And my point is...

David Heinemeier Hansson: They pretend... Act like they don't like money.

David Senra: Exactly.

David Heinemeier Hansson: They all do.

David Senra: Yeah, exactly. And so my point is just, like, how you make money actually matters.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: But to me, it's like the best definition of business I ever heard actually came from Richard Branson. He says, "A business is just an idea to make somebody else's life better." That is why... And there are infinite ways to make somebody else's life better, so therefore, there are always going to be infinite opportunities in the future.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: If you make a product that other people love, and it makes somebody else's life better, that they decide to give you their hard-earned money in exchange for, like, that is the system working. What I like about you is, again, I think you guys had this counter-narrative where it's just like, "We prize independence, we want to do things for decades. We want to build the products for ourselves first, and then just find the other, like-minded people."

David Senra: But you're not shy about, like, "Yeah, here's my Pagani, and here's this floating desk in Malibu that now goes viral all the time." And so, we talked about this a little bit last night, and you said it straight away. You go, "Yeah, that's an example that capitalism works."

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: It's not just like you're, "Look at the shit that I have." That's not what you're doing.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Right.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I actually think there's some obligation of people who've been able to make things work to show that it did work, that it is a carrot that you put out to others. I think it's completely legitimate to be motivated in part by wanting to have nice things, that you have a dream car that you aspire to. I certainly had that as a kid. I thought like, "Oh, look at all these cool cars." Like, I didn't have any concept that I'd ever have an opportunity to reach that and afford it, but it was part of a driver.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I think that's a good thing, part of capitalism. We want to better our lot, and some of that is material, and there's no shame in that whatsoever. And not only that, I think there's a second order of capitalism. You have an obligation. If you sell a product or service and you make a lot of money on it, put that money back into the system. Send some of that money to the craftsmen of Italy to create you a beautiful Ferrari, right? Like, there's someone who has to stitch that seat such that it's just right. There are engineers who are putting together that car such that it exists in the world.

David Heinemeier Hansson: We would not have Ferraris to pine for if no one bought them. And who can buy them? The people who've been successful in other parts of their business. So therefore, it is your moral obligation to buy a Ferrari if you do really well, or a Lamborghini or a Pagani or whatever floats your boat. But you should be sending this forward. This is how we get to have nice things. Not everything can just be boiled down to needs.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Man needs more than just bread to live. We need beautiful Ferraris, even if we don't own them. This is one of the things I love so much about cars, is that they're actually a shared collective enjoyment. The number of times I've driven in a nice car, next to especially kids, because kids have not yet internalized this filter that they're supposed to be cynical about wealth and nice things. They go like, "Whoa!" And then you rev the damn thing, and they go, "Yeah!" Right?

David Heinemeier Hansson: There's just an instinctual human attraction to beautiful things that make noise, right? And it's just joy. And why would you be ashamed of that? Why would you be reserved about that? Unless you feel like you're guilty about how you made your money. I mean, there are some people in the world who probably should be a little guilty about how they made their money, and maybe they don't buy the Ferraris. But for anyone else who's made legitimately good services or products and had success with them, they should be able to celebrate that.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Now, is there a line where you turn over to a bore of a braggart that's nothing about this, "I bought this, I bought that"? Yes, there is. But you can settle that line. We don't have to be either/or. You can both be passionate about the things that you're creating and validate why you made your money in a reasonable way, because you made something good that other people want to pay for. And then here are the fruits of that labor. And this is capitalism, and it's beautiful.

David Heinemeier Hansson: It is absolutely beautiful. It's worth celebrating. It's worth exalting. It's worth making an example for. And in fact, in my personal case, I mean, a lot of this also could just be post-rationalization, because I like nice things and I don't want to feel guilty about it. But let's just put that aside for a second, and focus on the fact that we built 37signals in a kind of weird way for a software company. Most of our peers, they raised a bunch of money from VCs, and they did all sorts of other things.

David Heinemeier Hansson: We built a software company out of Chicago at a time where there was absolutely nothing f***ing going on in Chicago inside of tech. And we built it on 40 hours a week. We built it on having a life next to work. We built it on going for the long-term. We built it on taking profits out of the business rather than just chasing higher valuations. And therefore, that is a counter-narrative to how you can also build a business, and I want to validate that that is a reasonable thing to pick even if you also want a nice Ferrari.

David Heinemeier Hansson: These things are not in opposition. You mentioned the lifestyle business thing, right? I always loved that, because people are like, "Oh yeah, you're just running a lifestyle business." Yeah, I have a business and a lifestyle. What the f*** do you have? Right? You just have a business? Or why would you not want a lifestyle? And my lifestyle happens to include a f***ing yellow Lamborghini. So, it's not like I'm giving anything up in terms of the material fruits of capitalism, right?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Like, these are actually compatible notions, and therefore, if someone is looking at, "Which way should I go? I'm starting a new business. Should I raise a bunch of money?" Fine, that's one path, and if you need to invest a bunch of capital in, I don't know, factories or GPUs or whatever, you should probably raise a bunch of money.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I don't have anything fundamentally against that. I have something against this notion that this is the only way to go. And I also do have a little bit against it when it comes to software, right? Like, I always felt it was just a waste. Why are you raising all this money just to have a bunch of programmers to sit around, right? Like, just build it yourself. You don't need as many as you think.

David Heinemeier Hansson: That was our model: tiny team, building great software, having good success, not taking any money, then producing profits. I know this is a bit of a foreign term in much of Silicon Valley. Like, that's the money you get to keep when you've taken your revenues and minus your expenses, right? And when you get to keep that profit, you actually become interested in increasing it, and that increases your efficiency, and I think actually this is part of my aesthetic appreciation of capitalism, and this is why I care about cost so much.

David Senra: Okay.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Because that appreciation is what makes the entire system more efficient. If I'm hiring three times as many people as I actually need, I'm robbing the world of those people who could have gone to do other productive things rather than spin their wheels at my little business when I could have gotten away with a third, right? And then also, the more money I spend on expenses, the less I get to keep for yellow Lamborghinis. So, it's really quite simple, the math.

David Senra: And you have to think of the Italian craftsman.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Exactly.

David Senra: When you're going through your expenses and using Ramp, because they're my biggest supporter and the best expense management software...

David Heinemeier Hansson: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: If you don't do this, if you're not running your business on Ramp, think of the poor Italian craftsmen. So, this is something that history's greatest entrepreneurs repeat over and over again, and in fact, we were talking last night. I'm going to pull up the group chat that we're in with Jason, because I dropped it in there while we were talking last night.

David Senra: Like, you kept hounding on the fact that you just get off on clipping expenses and like finding it.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: And I think it's the same kind of refinement you were talking with your product design.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Oh, I love it.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: And I showed you this quote, and you're like, "Oh, shit, I didn't hear this. This is great."

David Heinemeier Hansson: This is awesome.

David Senra: And so, I'm going to read this. It used to be in every single Ramp ad. It says, "Carnegie," Andrew Carnegie, "Carnegie would repeat his mantra time and again. He says, 'Profits and prices are cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces on the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled, and any savings achieved in the costs of goods were permanent.'"

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: He said that 150, almost 200 years ago.

David Heinemeier Hansson: It's remarkable how that goes directly to my kind of thinking on, because I know how hard it is actually to increase revenue. Like, if you already have a going business and you want it to grow massively, it's very difficult. It's very difficult to convince customers to part with their money.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I try very hard to do so. We as a business try very hard to do it. Everyone tries to do that, right? And it's outside of your control to a large degree. What I can control is my inputs. I can put out the best damn software product I know how. I can talk about it. I can out-share the competition or out-teach the competition, and therefore create this reciprocal relationship with potential customers.

David Heinemeier Hansson: But ultimately, I don't get to choose whether they put in their credit card or not; they do. I do get to choose how much money we spend on servers. I do get to choose whether we squander that revenue on needless cloud services rather than just owning our own hardware, right?

David Heinemeier Hansson: These are things within my control, and I love things that are within my control because I have this direct input on it, and I can immediately see the result of me taking an action. If I cut off a recurring... I mean, it's funny, because at this point, I really shouldn't have to worry about, I don't know, a 2,000-dollar-a-month recurring expense on something, but oh my God, the satisfaction I get from striking that line.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Replacing it either with something that's free or just slightly lower cost is a key part of the mechanics of the business I just really like, because I also just have this aesthetic appreciation of an efficient business, like an efficient engine or an efficient computer that's not wasting cycles on things that don't propel it forward.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Expenses are exactly that. It's taking out these inefficiencies. And very often what I find is that when you take out expenses that shouldn't be there, it's not just about the extra money you get to keep. The whole thing gels better. When you have a smaller team with better people with higher competence, it's just more fun to work with a tight crew.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I don't know many entrepreneurs who don't look back upon the early days with longing eyes, right? Like, just this lost love. Remember when we were just 10 around a table?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Now, you get other benefits, and I'm sure, I mean, Tobi commands an army of 7,000 and can do very different things now and impact the world in very different things, but in terms of just that tight loop of working on something with a small team, it's incredible, right? And a lot of that comes from how do we make that small team, that small company, as efficient as possible? Because then we can reach further, and we have more resources to do things and so forth. So, I just love expense reports.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I didn't know this about myself, by the way. This is some of these amazing things you discover as you just do it, right? As I told you last night, if you told my 18-year-old self that, "You're going to love going through expense reports, you're going to love finding little lines that you can put a marker around, and then go hunt until it disappears," I would've said, "That sounds like an accountant. That's not me." But it turns out it is, and I love it.

David Senra: All right, so you mentioned the yellow Lambo a couple of times. You bought the yellow Lambo after Bezos bought into a chunk in the very early days, when you basically, by your own admission, didn't have much of a business.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: So, he gave you a bunch of money, whatever, millions of dollars. You're like, "Hey, I got a couple million. I've got to give at least 200 grand to these Italian craftsmen."

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: Right? So, you buy the yellow Lambo. But more interesting than the yellow Lambo to me is what you said, where you said that, what Jeff Bezos did for you and Jason, gave you the confidence to go for it. Can you explain that?

David Heinemeier Hansson: So, in the early days of 37signals, we had launched Basecamp, it was taking off quite well, and we got a lot of interest and outreach from VCs.

David Heinemeier Hansson: We counted 40-some at the time. And this was 2005-ish. I still had a very vivid memory of the dot-com boom and bust. I had seen what happened to some of these VC-funded companies and the internal mechanics of that, and I didn't like any of it. And I also had all these ideas about efficient businesses and what it takes to run them. So, we didn't actually want VCs.

David Heinemeier Hansson: But going back to this point about trusting yourself, I didn't fully trust myself not to get tempted by a 20 million dollar check, a 50 million dollar check, whatever the number was, at a time when my bank account said, I don't know, 8,000 dollars.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Funny thing, my bank account did say slightly higher than that. When I came to the US, I think I had, like, 50 grand that we had worked up as we started Basecamp. And the first thing I did as soon as I landed, was Jason took me to an Audi dealership, and I bought an Audi S4, my first car, cash.

David Heinemeier Hansson: It was basically all the money I had in my bank account. So, I just blew it all on the car, and I thought, "We're going to make it back." But this notion that we had something that was taking off, but this is all fleeting.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I had great humility that, like, I'd seen many other businesses: "Oh, it's popping off," and then it's leveling off, and then it crashes, right? You can sell promise. That is one thing the VCs will buy any day of the week, right? A promise. There's a trajectory. There's traction. This is going places. It may be small now, but if we keep plotting the lines, it's going to go to the moon. I'm going to get in early, and you can make some money off that. We didn't want those people on board. Jeff showed up around the same time, and we thought it was the same pitch.

David Heinemeier Hansson: But it turned out it wasn't, right? Like, he was not interested in the regular VC deals. That wasn't why he was doing it. I'm not actually 100% sure why he was doing it. I think he just enjoyed getting involved with companies and people that he has an interest in.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Anyway, he reaches out, and we basically flippantly tell him no, and then politely his team reaches out again like, "No, actually, Jeff would really like to meet," and you're like, "Okay, fine." I mean, anyone who's actually built something, this is one of my beefs at times with some quarters of the VC community, like, you're just a money person, which is actually weird, why I consider that to be derogatory, but I do. Like, if the only thing you do is money, I'm skeptical of you. If you've built things and you've made money, let's talk.

David Heinemeier Hansson: But if it's just about the money and the allocation, I don't know. I'd rather talk to some builders, and Jeff is certainly a builder. Absolutely built something in a very, very different way than we had built our things, right? Like, he went, "Let's just raise all the money in the world, and I don't care if we don't make anything for 20 years." It was polar opposites in a lot of ways of how we built our business, but that was also just interesting. Don't surround yourself with a bunch of people who think just like you, who will say all the same things that you think and will think all the same thoughts that you think.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Jeff had very different thoughts, and that was very appealing. So anyway, long story short, we ended up giving him a ridiculous term sheet. It was just, like, flippantly, I mean, almost offensively overvalued. There was not a lot here. There was a promise, but we then took that promise, and then we just drew the line to the moon and said, "We want to be paid as though we were up here," and this is such a stupid number for the time; he's not going to take it. And then he took it. And it turned out to be an amazing investment for him.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I mean, I actually wish I had some of the gumption that Jeff has to see that far into it. Like, we've given him his money back many, many, many times over, and he still owns the plot, and every quarter or so, we send him another check. "Here's your dividends," and we keep on doing that. But that gave us the confidence to say no to everything else. It gave us the reassurance that if this wasn't going to pan out, we at least didn't have to go look for a job, like, the next Monday, and that was an incredible gift.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And Jeff then followed up with that gift, not just with the money, but with the advice, and the advice was usually, we'd meet with Jeff once a year in the early years, and we'd have dinner, and Jason and I would share our trials and tribulations, and we'd ask Jeff like, "Here's the situation," and Jeff would go like, "What do you think?" And we'd go like, "Well, I think we should do that." "That's a good idea. You should do that." And it sounds so simple. It almost sounds like it doesn't have any value, and it actually had all the value in the world.

David Heinemeier Hansson: He could have replied with all, "Like, you should do this thing," and given us a detailed plan, but just that confidence. Here's f***ing Jeff Bezos, king of the goddamn world in that sphere, telling us he believes in us? He thinks that our thoughts are valuable and good? And the funny thing is neither Jason nor I, I think, generally have a deficit in self-confidence, but it's like, there's self-confidence, and then there's Jeff telling you, "No, you're right." Oh my God, rocket boost. Let's strap in. Let's go.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And then, in some ways, I think he turbocharged sort of just that brashness, that indignation, that, "Hey, here's a different way of building things, and we're not shy about sharing that we built it in a very different way." And a lot of that came from Jeff, and we owe him tremendous gratitude. And actually, when I look back upon the things I regret, I regret not being a little bit more grateful for that. Like, in the long run, it was a really pivotal moment for not just the business. It could have gone a very different way.

David Heinemeier Hansson: We could not have gotten Jeff's offer, and six months later, some VC would have given us a massive check that sounded super impressive, and it would have destroyed the business, and then we would have sold our independence, and we would have been f***ing miserable pricks. And that didn't happen, and it's thanks to Jeff, so.

David Senra: That's beautiful. I got one more thing I want to talk to you about, which I thought was very interesting because, again, I think this speaks to your idea of, like, you're pretty fluid in your... You have strong opinions, sometimes weakly held, and even though you have been known as, basically, a VC critic, what you shared with me last night was that in the most difficult time of your business, Marc Andreessen was the single most helpful person to you.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes.

David Senra: Can you talk about what was the difficult time, and then what did Marc do for you?

David Heinemeier Hansson: So in 2021, we had a huge blowup at the company. This was the peak woke insanity era. This was everyone posting proclamations about political ideas on corporate pages that had nothing to do with each other, and it was an era where there was an activist group inside almost every tech company in the world pushing these companies to do all these things, almost extorting them to do all of these things.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And we kind of got boiled like a frog a little bit at 37signals, Jason and I, where we had probably seen good intentions in places where there weren't any, and allowed things to kind of roll. I mean, it happened quite quickly. It wasn't like something that's been building for 20 years. Within, I don't know, from '18, I'd say, was where you started to see the first inklings of there's an activist core minority who suddenly have all these ideas of what the company should and shouldn't do, and what's kosher and not, and what's offensive and not, and pushing on things.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And we're like, "Ah, we can manage." And then by '21, it became clear that if we didn't do something, this could eat the entire company, the soul of the company, the feel of the company, and we could end up with a business we didn't want to be in. This was our business, and I've had moments during that time where I've said, like, "Eh, do you know what? Maybe it's time to retire," which is f***ing preposterous. I still like what I do. I liked the vast majority of people I worked with. I liked the business. I liked the technology. Why would I want to retire from that?

David Heinemeier Hansson: Oh, it's because there's this miserable contingency that's poisoning everything. So, we just went, "Okay, let's just put a hardcore stop to it." And the stop was Jason and I deciding we're just going to end it tomorrow. No more discussing politics inside of our work channels. We're not going to settle, I don't know, the Palestine question inside the same space where we're discussing features in Basecamp.

David Heinemeier Hansson: That is not an appropriate venue for having these things, and in fact, it's incredibly divisive to introduce that kind of political energy into a professional environment. And we did that, and we made some other changes, but it was really that thing about politics that ticked people off because there was this core contingency inside the company who's very ideologically wedded to the idea that our business was a vehicle for their political aspirations for all these topics.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And then there was the larger context of the Internet, and especially Twitter at the time, that was very engaged in all of these topics, right? So, it just blew up. We put out a memo saying, "It's over," and we also knew it was going to be contentious, so after it proved to be contentious, we doubled down on it and said, "Do you know what? If you can't see yourself at a company where we're not going to discuss f***ing Palestine during work hours with your random coworkers, we will pay you up to six months' salary to go somewhere else."

David Heinemeier Hansson: And at the time, the job market in tech was just booming, right? Like everyone was getting offers left, right, and center, so this was an incredibly attractive offer. "Here's six months' salary, and you can get a new job on Monday." It was almost like a mega bonus for getting the f*** out of there, and it was the best money we've ever spent on anything related to culture, maybe anything at all. Of all the things that I've bought, that peace of mind we bought with those payouts was just priceless, because what it did was it didn't just cut out surgically just that bit of cancer. It cut out a thick ring around it.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And what we ended up with was a culture that was completely cured of all that insanity in one swoop. Now, the patient had a little bit of a rough going for a while, and it was that rough going where Andreessen came in, because we're a small company. 60 people, so at the time, 20 took the offer. 20 left.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Like, that's almost a third of the company that decided to leave in that moment, and we got to a point where we were thinking, "Not that many more have to leave before I'm starting to get worried about whether we can keep the lights on." And it was actually Tobi who then put me in contact with Marc Andreessen because Marc had been exposed to this phenomenon at all of his portfolio companies.

David Heinemeier Hansson: And just even getting that initial exposure, "Hey, there are other people struggling with this, by the way, even though you're getting skewered right now on Twitter and being haunted by the mob. Like, this is happening all over. You're not unique in this way, and that's some reassurance. And by the way, here's a bunch of contacts. Do you need someone to come in to help do programming or operations or whatever? I know this, I know this, I know this."

David Heinemeier Hansson: And I was just floored by the generosity because I think, well, I don't think, Marc and I haven't always seen eye to eye on these things, right?

David Senra: Exactly.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Especially in terms of venture capital. He's been one of the main faces of venture capital for decades, and I've been kind of critical at times. And there was just a realization that all those grievances we might have thought to be so big once upon a time were actually minuscule.

David Heinemeier Hansson: We were fighting the White Walkers on the other side of the wall, and all our internal squabbles were going to be for nothing if those f***ers got inside the wall and destroyed everything, all of it, and that felt like a real threat at the time. That could've happened. They could very well have just ripped the whole thing apart, and Marc clearly saw that, that this was a collective, almost existential threat to the entire industry.

David Heinemeier Hansson: If these activists were able to take over these institutions in the same way that they have taken over academia, we would be f***ed, and not just for a little while, but potentially for decades. That couldn't stand. So clearly when Jason and I stood up and said, "We're not doing it," right? There were a bunch of people who said, "Great that they're going first, so they take a bit of the heat, but also let's help them."

David Heinemeier Hansson: And Marc was incredibly helpful, not just in terms of these contacts and introductions and so on that we ended up not needing, but it was very powerful. When you have literally 40,000 people on Twitter calling you all the worst things in the world, even the strongest individual might go for a second like, "Holy shit. Like, the mob is coming for me, and there's no one else there." And there were other people there. There were people there. Tobi was there.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Marc was there, and it was incredibly helpful to give us the fortitude to go like, "No, do you know what? We're going to stick with it. We're not going to grovel. We're not going to apologize. We're not going to revert." And then what Marc also did was he gave me a syllabus for understanding the history of wokeness, going all the way back to the '60s and beyond, that this didn't just come as lightning from a blue sky.

David Heinemeier Hansson: This had an institutional grounding that was set in motion particularly in the '60s, the long march through the institutions, Herbert Marcuse, and a lot of the Frankfurt School, and all of these groups that had designs on how to reshape society and create the revolution they so dearly wanted, but with a timeline and a roadmap that was demarcated in decades.

David Heinemeier Hansson: That it wasn't just like, "Well, we're going to put something together, and then in two years something's going to..." No, they were sitting in the f***ing '60s, fantasizing about how to overthrow everything in the 2000s, right? Actually incredible in like a "Dr. Evil" sense of it, but when you're on the receiving end of it, it seemed a little less incredible, and it was just difficult not knowing. Like, where's this coming from? Why is this happening all of a sudden? Well, it wasn't happening all of a sudden.

David Heinemeier Hansson: There was this long history of it, and when you understood that history, it made a lot more sense, and it gave more of a purpose to the rejection of it, right? We weren't just making a rejection for our little corner of the world. We were chipping in, in the great civilizational battle of where this country was going to go, of whether the White Walkers beyond the wall were going to win. And we were like, "No, they're not going to f***ing win. Get up onto that f***ing wall. Take your goddamn spear. Fire it with maximum velocity."

David Senra: David, this is awesome. Anytime you're in town, text me, and we'll run this back as much as you want. Thanks, man.

David Heinemeier Hansson: Awesome.

David Senra: I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening, and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.