Founders at Work.pdf

David Heinemeier Hansson 315
Livingston: So, much of your innovation was driven by your own needs, rather
than your clients’ requests?
Heinemeier Hansson: Very much so. It’s good to be market-driven in the
sense that you should know what’s going on, but you can’t let your customers
drive your product development. You need to be able to innovate on behalf of
your customers, but they often don’t know what they want. And it’s the same
thing for programmers. If you went around and asked them what they wanted
in a framework, you wouldn’t get a good product out of that. You need to be
able to source input from a lot of sources, and then have your vision of what it’s
going to be and then drive that.
You need to drive both framework development and product development
with a strong vision, where you’re not afraid to turn somebody off. We’re not
afraid to say to a customer, “Maybe Basecamp is not for you. If you want those
five things, maybe you should go look for something else.”
Livingston: Now that you have received a lot of publicity, have you been wooed
by investors?
Heinemeier Hansson: Yeah. We’ve gotten quite a lot of VC calls. But one of
the things we’re seeing that we really don’t care too much for is that way too
many companies are taking money when they don’t need it. And the whole idea
we had was that having too little money is a great way of getting great product,
because it’s a way to get focused.
So we have definitely said to ourselves, “We don’t want any outside money.
We actually don’t even want to grow our team.” We’re trying to design our
products in a way that they can scale with more users without us having to scale
as a company. So, through Signal vs. Noise, we’re trying to deliver a pushback to
companies that feel like they have to hire a bunch of people as early as possible
and to take money to realize their vision by saying, “If your vision of your product
costs a million bucks to make, try rescoping that idea in your head so it fits
in $100K and get it out there earlier. Instead of having a 1-year product cycle,
what could you do in 1 month?”
And sure, that doesn’t work for every company, but in the web age, it works
for way more companies than are trying to.
Livingston: Might you ever get acquired?
Heinemeier Hansson: We’re not that focused on that at all, but we’re not ignorant
to the world that we’re living in. There’s no urgency though, because we’re
a profitable company just doing what we do. If somebody comes tomorrow and
offers us $100 million, I’d be pretty foolish to say, “No, never.”
Livingston: What’s been the most surprising thing?
Heinemeier Hansson: I think I’m fairly surprised that we’ve been able to stay
true to our initial values. Since we launched Basecamp, we’ve added only one
more person, even though the product has grown like crazy. I’m definitely surprised
that we’ve been able to grow and not write a whole lot of software, and
still make a difference.