Founders at Work.pdf

David Heinemeier
Hansson
Partner, 37signals
C H A P T E R
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David Heinemeier Hansson helped transform 37signals
from a consulting company to a product company in
early 2004. He wrote the company’s first product,
Basecamp, an online project management tool. He
also wrote companion products Backpack, Ta-da List,
and Campfire.
In July 2004, he released the layer of software that
underlies these applications as an open source web
development framework. Ruby on Rails has since
become one of the most popular tools among web
developers and won Heinemeier Hansson the Hacker
of the Year award at OSCON in 2005.
In July 2006 (after this interview), 37signals president Jason Fried
announced on the company’s blog that Jeff Bezos had made a minority private
equity investment.
Livingston: 37signals wasn’t begun as a startup, correct?
Heinemeier Hansson: 37signals was founded by Jason Fried as a web design
shop in 1999. It transitioned from a consulting company to a product company
with the creation of Basecamp. I’m part of the 37signals 2.0 management team.
Livingston: So the launch of Basecamp was a pivotal turning point for the
company?
Heinemeier Hansson: It was not an overnight transition. While we were
developing Basecamp, 37signals had a lot of client work, so we couldn’t dedicate
more than about a third of our time to it. It wasn’t a client project; it was
something that we created as an internal tool to help us manage our client
work.
Livingston: Take me back to the time of the Basecamp launch and the transition.
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