Foundr Magazine Podcast | Learn From Successful Founders & Proven Entrepreneurs, The Ultimate Startup Podcast For Business

Eighteen years ago, David Heinemeier Hansson was a college student sitting in his little apartment in Copenhagen when he stumbled across a blog post by 37signals (which would later become Basecamp), a Chicago-based design company he had long admired. In the post, co-founder Jason Fried posted a question on some aspect of programming. Hansson knew the answer, so he contacted Fried. Several emails later, Fried was asking Hansson to work with him. “Jason decided it was easier just to hire me than to learn how to program,” Hansson says, “and that's how we started working together.” That was the beginning of a now-legendary tech startup team, and an illustrious career for Hansson. In Hansson’s early days at Basecamp, he famously created Ruby on Rails, an open-source web development framework once used by Twitter, and still in use by GitHub, Shopify, and many more. We were excited to talk shop with Hansson (often known as DHH) because, in an industry dominated by breakneck Silicon Valley culture, Basecamp stands ou